Mrs. Woolf and the Servants

by Alison Light (Bloomsbury; $30)

This engrossing portrait of Virginia Woolf and the women who looked after her explores how modern ideas of class and gender crucial to Woolf’s writing ran up against her lingering ties to a waning Victorian domestic order. Woolf frequently pondered the “servant question,” but her concern for those she employed was tinged with distaste. “I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,” she wrote of Nellie Boxall, her cook for eighteen years. Though Woolf professed a desire for a time when masters and servants might be “fellow beings,” and argued in her work for space and autonomy for women, her life was one of dependence; she did not learn to cook until she was forty-seven. Light deftly “restores the servants to the story,” arguing that Woolf’s relationships with them were “as enduring, intimate and intense as any in her life.” ♦